Group Offers to Buy Bankrupt Mt. Gox Exchange for 1 Bitcoin

It's unclear if court will OK the transfer

A group of bitcoin investors are offering to purchase and revive Mt. Gox — the bankrupt online digital currency exchange — in exchange for 1 bitcoin.

The offer was filed in Tokyo District Court last month.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Brock Pierce, CEO of GoCoin, venture capitalists Matthew Roszak of SilkRoad Equity, and William Quigley of Clearstone Venture Partners have plans to jump start the exchange again after its collapse earlier this year.

With John Betts, a former maven of electronic trading at Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, at the helm of a revived exchange, their plan is to trade back to profitability and funnel half of the transaction fees back to customers who were burned by the exchange’s collapse in February.

There are no guarantees the court will agree to this plan. …The group is taking on the whole enterprise, complete with a responsibility to try to repay the customers, who despite the discovery of 200,000 bitcoins last month still have no idea where 550,000 of their bitcoins (worth $212 million) are.

Just recently, Mt. Gox said it found some of the missing money, lowering the number of bitcoins missing from the bankrupt exchange. Mt. Gox said that the rediscovered bitcoins have been transferred to offline wallets to protect them from hackers.

When Mt. Gox declared bankruptcy, it said hackers had stolen 750,000 customer bitcoins and 100,000 of its own — following a breach in its software.

But what’s certain in this deal is that bitcoin — the entire concept of bitcoin — needs this revival to reinstall consumer confidence in the digital currency.

The group said in the filing that Mt. Gox’s present value was zero — and the Wall Street Journal reported that their offer would be one bitcoin for the sale transfer.